What's new? Macdonald stars in another bomb

[ RATING: Negative ]

Screwed? You were if you paid money to see it.

Screwed is another Norm Macdonald joke movie that isn't funny. The best thing about it? The coming attractions trailers before the movie starts.

What a surprise, Macdonald starring in another dud.

In the latest one, he plays a chauffeur who tries to kidnap the dog of his cranky boss. By some quirk of stupidity, folks decide that the chauffeur has been ransomed when he goes missing and the dog returns.

Annoying

A series of really annoying, obnoxious and resoundingly dumb scenes follow, and there's nothing you can do about it.

It's clear that there's nothing co-directors Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski feel they can do about it.

They more or less let the 'slapshtick' run the gamut from cornball to disgusting. Certainly, the dog-bites-Norm sequence is a bloody mess, figuratively and literally. And it's not even remotely snicker-worthy unless you really hate Macdonald.

Alexander and Karaszewski can't even blame the screenwriters, since they are them.

And they aren't necessarily bad ones either. Well, three out of four isn't bad.

They wrote Ed Wood, The People Vs. Larry Flynt and Man On The Moon before they got Screwed. I hope they were nice to people on the way up.

There are others in the career-limiting Screwed department.

David Chappelle, a reasonably bright comic, plays Macdonald's sidekick. He should be embarrassed, but he probably knew the job was dangerous to his future when he took it.

Elaine Stritch, who portrays the rich dowager Miss Crock, is apparently willing to do anything for money. Danny DeVito has a cameo as a mad undertaker. He is apparently willing to do anything, and he doesn't need the money.

No content

And then there's Macdonald, a Canadian without content.

His last witty thing was the Saturday Night Live fake news. He's obviously good at faking it.

What he can't do is act, confirmed previously in Dirty Work and currently on the TV series The Norm Show.

Somebody, please! Give Macdonald a full-time cable talk show, and put us out of our misery.
-- Bob Thompson

Enjoyable comedy 'Screwed' merits better than eponymous treatment it has received

[ RATING: 3 out of 4 stars ]

Elaine Stritch is one of those venerable Broadway divas who, for some reason, never made it in movies. Others include those two powerhouses, Carol Channing and Chita Rivera; the wonderful Blythe Danner (Gwyneth Paltrow's look-alike mom); and relatively younger stars like Roxanne Hart and Swoosie Kurtz.

But of them all, Stritch, with her booming, boozy voice and impeccable comic timing was the one who was made for CinemaScope and Technicolor. And it took the wild writing team of Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski -- whose movie scripts include "Ed Wood," "The People vs. Larry Flynt" and "Man on the Moon" -- to finally put Stritch at the center of a film. In their debut as film directors, the pair has cast the actress in "Screwed" as a gruff, savvy old business woman who has wheeled and dealed one merger too many.

Stritch's Virginia Crock is the head of the self-named Miss Crock's Cookies of Pittsburgh, and even though she's worth a gazillion dollars, she's so tight with money that she has only one home employee -- one Willard Fillmore (Norm Macdonald) whom she shamefully overworks and verbally abuses, to boot.

Willard has worked for Miss Crock for 15 years now, following in the footsteps of his father, who worked for her for 30 years before dropping dead. Willard does everything around her mansion, except service her sexually the way his dad did. Maybe that's why she holds him in such low regard.

Well, come Christmas, when Miss Crock refuses to buy Willard the new butler's uniform that he needs, he decides it's time for a little revenge. With his pal Rusty Hayes (Dave Chappelle), Willard thinks up the plot for a kidnapping.

At first, Rusty wants to kidnap Crock herself. "We'll hold the old bag for ransom," he says. "And if they don't come through, we'll start hacking off her fingers -- first her thumb, then the pointer and then the old nasty one."

But Willard's idea is to steal Miss Crock's awful pet dog, Muffin (who, incidentally, is one of the funniest canine brats to take over the screen in ages), leaving a ransom note behind. But when Muffin escapes, returning home, and Miss Crock finds the note, she and the director of her company, Chester "Chip" Oswald (Sherman Hemsley), assume that it's Willard who has been kidnapped and are reluctant to deliver any ransom money.

"Screwed," which wasn't screened in advance because its studio -- Universal -- probably didn't "get it," is a fractured version of an O. Henry tale which spins so out of control that Willard and Rusty have to go to a deranged morgue worker named Grover Cleaver (Danny DeVito) to come up with a body so that Willard can fake his own death. Grover delivers the dead body of a septuagenarian midget with a full beard and long hair. (Willard is young, about 6 feet tall and clean shaven). Doesn't matter, though, because by now the police are led to believe that the dead midget was Willard's kidnapper.

And on and on it goes, becoming more unhinged as it keeps making wrong turns. "Screwed" is an insane comedy -- not a great one, but a good one, and certainly better than most junk routinely screened and screened again by the studios. (Anyone here remember "American Pie"?) You'll find nothing funnier or more original, for example, than the scene in which DeVito exhibits the things he's extracted from the cavities of cadavers.

Alexander and Karaszewski manage to play tribute to "Hawaii Five-O" and the late Jack Lord by making DeVito the inexplicable president of The Jack Lord Fan Club. And the duo also plug their own "Ed Wood" movie by including a quick clip from Wood's "Glen or Glenda?" cult film.

But the choice stuff goes to Stritch, who milks every laugh line with her bourbon voice. This is the funniest performance by a Broadway diva since Ethel Merman played a delusional soldier who thought he was Ethel Merman in "Airplane" (1980), a film with much the same verve and crudeness of "Screwed."

And, by the way, does that title have anything to do with the half-hearted release the film has been given?

Just asking.
-- Joe Baltake

DeVito Hits Bottom In Laughless 'Screwed'

[ RATING: Embarrassing ]

Sometimes you don't know whether you're going to get Good Danny or Bad Danny.

In what I hope was a once-in-a- lifetime coincidence, two movies featuring Danny DeVitod yesterday, one of his best and one of his worst. ``The Big Kahuna'' contains one of DeVito's most accomplished performances, the product not only of a lifetime of acting but also of a life sensitively experienced.

The other, ``Screwed,'' you should pardon the expression, is a complete misfire. Poor DeVito shouldn't feel singled out. ``Screwed'' is an embarrassment for everyone involved.

The new Norm Macdonald movie, whichd yesterday without press screenings, gives stupid, vulgar comedy a bad name.

Macdonald is the put-upon chauffeur-butler for a rich old skinflint (Elaine Stritch). In an effort to extort ransom from her, he ends up kidnapping himself (don't ask). DeVito is a morgue worker recruited to provide a dead body to fake the chauffeur's death.

It is a real chore to sit through and may be some kind of a first for a comedy. It doesn't have a single honest laugh in it.

Musical comedy veteran Stritch not only has to endure the indignity of being exposed in her underwear for laughs, she also is shown on two occasions putting her false teeth in.

Don't waste any hand-wringing on Stritch, though. She is a tough old broad and will survive.
-- Bob Graham

[ RATING: 4 out of 5 stars ]

Oh man ! I haven't laughed this hard in so long ! Screwed is easily the most laugh out loud, fall out of your seat hilarious comedy I've seen so far this year. The last time I laughed this much at a movie was when I saw Man On The Moon, which was written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, whose directorial debut this is. Before the Andy Kaufman biopic, they wrote other fine films about off colored individuals such as Ed Wood and The People Versus Larry Flynt. These guys really have a wonderful sense of humor, a way of taking a situation and screwing it up, and then build and build on it as you howl with laughter ; just think of the scene in which Bela Lugosi battles a rubber octopus in Ed Wood. Being a fiction film, Screwed doesn't have the resonance of their biopics, but it truly delivers as far as chuckles go.

Meet Willard Fillmore (Norm MacDonald) who, after his father's death 15 years ago, took over the old man's job as chauffeur and servant to Miss Crock (Elaine Stritch), the bitchy head of an obscenely lucrative Pittsburgh pie factory. She makes him work like a dog, but even her pooch gets better treatment. So once upon a Christmas, Willard and his chicken frying buddy Rusty (Dave Chappelle) concoct a plan to kidnap said pooch and ask the old bag a million dollars to get it back. These guys being dopes, the whole affair screws up royally, the dog escapes and when Miss Crook reads the ransom note, she thinks it's Willard who was abducted ! This is pretty much what you've seen in the TV ads : a whacked out encore of the dog bashing scene in There's Something About Mary. But that's early in the film, before it really picks up gear. Afterwards, things keep getting more and more screwed, as the idiotic duo actually hire a creepy Hawaii 5-0 fanatic who works in a morgue (Danny De Vito) to find them a corpse to pass as Willard and... I don't want to give away all the twists but believe me, it's funny !

Besides Alexander and Karaszewski's laugh-packed script and dynamic direction, it's the performances that make the movie ignite. I'm a huge fan of Montreal-born Norm MacDonald, whom I've long called the Funniest Man Alive. I loved his antics on Saturday Night Live (especially when he helmed Weekend Update), and I always watch ABC's Norm, one of the best sitcoms on TV. He played bit parts in movies like Billy Madison and Dr Dolittle before he finally got a starring role in 1998's Dirty Work. I thought he was good in it but, as directed by Bob Saget (yes, Bob Saget), the film was so-so at best. Needless to say that I'm thrilled that he finally gets to shine on the big screen (even though I doubt a lot of people will bother to see the film). Norm's (dim) wits are matched by his partner-in-crime Dave Chappelle, a talented comedian best known for his hysterical starring role in the cult pothead comedy Half Baked. These two - and De Vito - are hilarious, and so's the movie. Give it a chance, you're not gonna regret it.
-- Norm K

[ RATING: 0.5 out of 4 stars ]

The writing team of Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski has penned three of the best movies of the '90s--"Man on the Moon," "The People vs. Larry Flynt" and "Ed Wood". Norm Macdonald has a well-defined and popular persona of an amoral and irreverent but likable schemer. So how come they couldn't come up with something better than this road kill of a movie?

And there's more. How did they manage to involve class acts like Danny DeVito, Elaine Stritch and Daniel Benzali in their folly? Surely there can't be that many incriminating photos out there.

Macdonald, straying far from his character comfort zone, plays the put-upon butler of a witchy tycoon. The hired hand is treated like a dog, or rather much worse than his mistress' pampered pooch. The Norm we know and love from movies ("Dirty Work") and TV (ABC's "Norm") would have told his employer where to stick her job, but then there would have been no "Screwed"--which would have been best for all concerned. Instead, there's a pathetic plot about kidnapping the dog for ransom, which veers off in convoluted and totally pointless directions. There is one brief promise of salvation with the introduction of Danny DeVito's creepy character--a morgue attendant with an impressive collection of things found inside corpses. Think Louis DePalma meets Frankenstein. But he's not given the opportunity to go anywhere with it.

The real tragedy is that there are no laughs--nothing remotely amusing. The closest it gets is naming the characters almost after presidents. There's Willard Fillmore, Grover Cleaver and Rusty B. Hayes. And the cop is called--wait for it--Tom Dewey. It might not be exactly side-splitting to suggest that audiences forking over their money expecting to be entertained are getting exactly what the title promises. But it would be funnier than the film.
-- Mike Kerrigan

Not Exactly the Farrellys

[ RATING: 0.5 out of 4 stars ]

Milos, baby, where are you?

Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, the Oscar-nominated scribes who authored screenplays for Milos Forman's last two films, The People Vs. Larry Flynt and Man On the Moon, have been left to their own devices on Screwed. Chances are extremely good their directorial debut won't inspire quite as much interest as Forman's A-list assignments.

A black comedy that never gets black enough to inspire Farrelly-style decadence (despite a sick-joke sequence involving an attack by a small dog, an obvious lift from There's Something About Mary), Screwed concerns a faked kidnapping engineered by a sad sack butler named Willard Fillmore (Norm Macdonald) and his best friend, Rusty Hayes (Dave Chappelle), a greasy spoon proprietor.

(The pointlessly distracting references to forgettable American presidents doesn't end with their names. Danny DeVito, producer and co-star of Man On the Moon, throws a bone to the novice directors by appearing as a brain-scrambled morgue attendant, Grover Cleaver.)

In any case, the fates of these clowns become intertwined when Willard, out of exasperation with his miserly employer, a filthy-rich pastry industrialist named Crock (Elaine Stritch), attempts to kidnap Crock's yappy mutt with the aid of Rusty. The dog escapes, and police are led to believe it's Willard who is being held for an enormous ransom.

Crock balks about paying while Willard and Rusty enlist Grover to deliver a corpse that could convincingly pass for Willard. The culprits plan to run off with the money and let officials believe the unfortunate butler is dead; alas, everything goes awry, but the movie never gets particularly funny. Luckily for Alexander and Karaszewski, Chappelle, Stritch, DeVito, and supporting players Sherman Helmsley and Daniel Benzali are complete pros, salvaging some of the proceedings from the surprising ordinariness of the script.

As for Macdonald, the guy deservedly made a name for himself on Saturday Night Live mocking mediocrities such as this film. His crafty sense of timing here with a line allows him to nail a couple pieces of dialogue with an irony so subtle it leaves no fingerprints. But for the most part, he's so uninvolved as a performer of someone else's material -- such a company man instead of a standout -- that his presence is negligible.

As for Alexander and Karaszewski, what gives? Isn't the point of climbing the Hollywood food chain to acquire enough clout to make the movies you want to make? If this is how they want to squander a hard-earned opportunity, they should keep their day jobs.
-- Tom Keogh

Can this be worse than Battlefield Earth?

[ RATING: Negative ]

The makers of Screwed are not proud parents. Sheepishly, they held on to the film for two years after completion, then left it on the doorstep of movie theatres without a press screening -- the birth announcement of the film industry -- hoping no one would notice what an ugly baby they had made. They were right to spare us.

Screwed is a very, very bad movie, the kind of film that generates only mortified silences at the places it should generate laughs. It has all the gross-out earmarks of a Farrelly Brothers film, with none of the payoff. Unless someone is sitting next to you whispering headlines from The Onion in your ear, you will not laugh more than twice.

Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, best known for writing stylish biopics like Ed Wood and The People vs. Larry Flynt, get behind the camera for the first time, co-directing their script. The premise is faux-Thirties screwball, and utterly non-sensical: Norm MacDonald plays a threadbare butler named Willard, indentured servant to Miss Crock (Elaine Stritch), a tyrannical baked goods maven with a Sara Lee image. She makes Willard sleep in the doghouse when he misbehaves, a disturbing image that's begs the question: Why doesn't he just quit?

Perhaps Willard is supposed to be stupid, a la Steve Martin in The Jerk. MacDonald is exactly wrong for a dumb naif role: His eyebrow wiggling shtick revolves around being the smartest ass in the room. MacDonald is no dummy, and since he's essentially playing himself here -- as evidenced by the sporadic use of his trademark word "whore" -- it's hard to believe he wouldn't just sass off Miss Crock with a whore or two and walk away.

Instead, with his sidekick, a chicken shack proprietor played by David Chappelle (who could do better), he kidnaps her dog for a $1-million ransom. This provides some of that dog humour that wasn't even cutting edge two years ago in There's Something About Mary: The dog attaches itself to MacDonald's hand and he spins around, blood flying everywhere. Everything that's gross in Screwed is just a little too gross to laugh at.

After the two bungle the dognapping, the public and the police believe Willard himself has been kidnapped, so the incompetents have to find a dead body to take his place. Enter Danny DeVito, as a green-coloured mortician. He holds up a pair of dice and says: "I just dug these out of a guy's colon." With a joke like that, you throw it and get the hell out, praying for the best. No such luck. The dice joke is followed by an endless scene cataloguing other items recently dislodged from the bowels of cadavers. Endless. I felt nauseous, and I liked Caligula.

This cheap-looking film -- snowy in one scene, summer in the next -- humiliates everyone involved: dogs, older women (accomplished stage actress Stritch is the butt of several mean-spirited jokes about her body), the actors who somehow landed in it. Screwed is a baby that should have been thrown out with the bathwater.
-- Katrina Onstad

[ RATING: Negative ]

Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski are best known for their inventive scripts for such bizarre biopics as Ed Wood, Man on the Moon and The People Vs. Larry Flynt. So the chances are good that they'll be able to brush off their current calamity Screwed, which marks their inauspicious directorial debuts as they guide their own terrible original script.

Strained even by derivative screwball-comedy standards, it stars Norm Macdonald (who still can't act) as underpaid manservant Willard Fillmore, who toils for a Cratchit-like employer named Miss Crock (Elaine Stritch), a Pittsburgh pastry-industry magnate. With the help of greasy-spoon worker Rusty P. Hayes (Dave Chappelle), the pair hatch a plot involving the dognapping of Crock's beloved cur. Things go awry, however, as Crock mistakenly thinks Fillmore has been kidnapped instead, a turn of events that allows the guys to ask Crock for a $5 million ransom demand. But when they enlist warped coroner Grover Cleaver (Danny DeVito) for some corpse-related chicanery to ensure their payday, the new partner's seedy demeanor ends up creating more headaches.

With Alexander and Karaszewski believing that funny names based on dead presidents is supposed to generate hilarity, you get a rough idea of this lowbrow laugher's intentions. And for a film that thinks it's brimming with outrageous shock value, led by the burned-in-your-retina image of Stritch in her undergarments, Screwed is actually a pretty mild moron movie that even stoops to a doggie-doo gag pilfered from John Waters' Pink Flamingos. At least Stritch has a high old time with her scene-chewing matron, while Daniel Benzali, as the requisite nosy dick, seems to be spoofing his overtly intense performance from his old TV series Murder One; Benzali's slooooow line readings probably add five more minutes to this bowwow's brief running time.
-- Bill DeLapp

Hard To Nail Down The Worst Thing About 'Screwed'

[ RATING: 1 out of 4 stars ]

‘SCREWED" is the title of a new comedy that sneaked into theaters yesterday without advance screenings for critics, and screwed is how you'll feel if you pay good money to see this unfunny flick.

It stars Norm MacDonald as Willard, a chauffeur so mild-mannered he doesn't protest when his super-bitch boss Miss Crock (Elaine Stritch) forces him to scrub her dentures - and her toilets.

Miss Crock, who owns a huge baked-goods factory and is known in public as a sweet old lady, dotes on her mean-tempered lapdog and her boyfriend Chip (Sherman Hemsley).

She's the kind of battle-ax who parades around in front of Willard in her girdle and laughs at him when he asks for a new uniform for Christmas.

Fed up with years of mistreatment, Willard and his pal Rusty (Dave Chappelle) come up with a scheme to kidnap her dog and ransom him for $1 million.

In a slapstick scene that borrows heavily from "There's Something About Mary," but lacks any real laughs, they manage to botch the kidnapping, but leave the house in such chaos that Miss Crock thinks Willard has been abducted.

While this might not be a terrible premise for a comedy, the actors go through their paces as if they're sleepwalking. Daniel Benzali barely registers as a bumbling detective.

But the real disappointment is Danny DeVito as a creepy coroner.

His scenes in the morgue, which involve licking items removed from corpses' colons, are so inept and witless it's hard not to spend the rest of the movie wondering why he agreed to participate in this mess.

If you want to see a truly funny movie about a botched kidnapping, go rent the Coen brothers' "The Big Lebowski," but skip "Screwed," which will be coming soon to a video store near you.
-- Hannah Brown

'Screwed' graduates with the crass of 2000

[ RATING: 0 out of 5 stars ]

While Danny DeVito is earning some of the best reviews of his career for ``The Big Kahuna,'' which Friday in the Twin Cities, he's also starring in ``Screwed,'' which arrived over the weekend with no advance press screenings.

No wonder. Also no wonder that ``Screwed'' has been on the shelf for more than a year. Why release it at all? The word ``crass'' does not begin to describe this laughless black comedy, which surely merits a place on every critic's 10-worst list come December.

DeVito plays a morbid mortician who gets involved in an attempted dognapping, planned by a frustrated chauffeur (Norm Macdonald) and his best friend (Dave Chappelle). Elaine Stritch is the chauffeur's nasty boss, Mrs. Crock, whose prized pooch is the intended ransom victim.

A ``Crock Crisis'' logo appears on television as reporters try to keep track of who's really been kidnapped, whether the $5 million ransom will be paid, who did the kidnapping and whether Macdonald will ever get that new uniform he wants from stingy Mrs. Crock.

``Screwed'' marks the directing debut of Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, the screenwriting team who wrote the smart biographical scripts for ``Ed Wood'' and ``Man on the Moon,'' and won a Golden Globe for writing ``The People vs. Larry Flynt.''

The real Ed Wood's ``Glen or Glenda'' turns up on television during the course of ``Screwed''; if it's an homage, it's an awfully lame one. Ditto for a scene in which the mistreatment of Mrs. Crock's dog threatens to require a lawsuit from the makers of ``There's Something About Mary.''

Alexander and Karaszewski also wrote ``Problem Child,'' ``Problem Child 2'' and Disney's wretched remake of ``That Darn Cat.'' Put this one down in that column.
-- John Hartl

[ RATING: Negative ]

"Sweet Jesus, we kidnapped a turd!" exclaims David Chappelle's aptly named Rusty in this Norm Macdonald farce, and the audience can certainly smell it. The turd in question is the product of the lap dog that the dimwitted butler/chauffeur Willard Fillmore, played by Macdonald, and his pal Rusty try to kidnap, in order to exact ransom and revenge for Willard's years of mistreatment by his crotchety employer, pastry tycoon Miss Crock (Elaine Stritch). The dog escapes, confusion reigns, and Mrs. Crock thinks it's Willard who's been abducted. The turd also sums up the film itself.

What was the last time we saw something truly funny on the big screen from a Saturday Night Live alum? Macdonald would seem to have film potential as the slightly-less-smug version of himself that he always plays, but here he gives a performance that defines "washed-up Canadian comic." Blame the writers. Taking their first turn in the directorial chair, screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (the team behind Ed Wood, The People Vs. Larry Flynt, and Man on the Moon) choose to fumble with an under-utilized cast (Danny DeVito, Daniel Benzali, Sarah Silverman) and a plot with holes so big you could drive a garbage truck through it. The end result is a weak Farrelly brothers ripoff with none of their wit or flair. The only people getting screwed here are the ones shelling out eight bucks to see this stinker.
-- Scott Kathan

[ RATING: 1 out of 4 stars ]

If there is any doubt that bad things can happen to good people, one need look no further than the appropriately named "Screwed."

"Screwed" marks the directorial debut of the successful writing team of Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who have won deserved accolades for such fresh and clever scripts as "Ed Wood" and "The People vs. Larry Flynt."

They also wrote "Screwed," but without knowing the story behind the story, my guess is that it is something the duo sketched out on legal pads during a drunken weekend back when they were film school classmates at the University of Southern California.

The press notes claim that "Screwed" is a homage to those plot-driven screwball comedies of the 1930s, many of them starring W.C. Fields. If so, this film was not recut prior to its release, but also chopped, filleted and minced.

The film stars the suddenly tedious Norm Macdonald as Willard Fillmore (just one of the character names that play on presidential monikers), the hard-working but unappreciated manservant for wealthy cookie mogul Miss Crock (Broadway actress Elaine Stritch). Furious that his cruel boss won't even buy him a new uniform to wear at work, Willard plots with his chicken-shack buddy, Rusty P. Hayes (Dave Chappelle), to kidnap Crock's beloved dog and hold him for a million-dollar ransom.

But things go awry, leading everyone involved, including police detective Tom Dewey (Daniel Benzali), to think that Willard is the one who has been snatched.

From this point on, all bets are off, as money exchanges hands with dull regularity.

Things start to look promising when the scattered plot leads us to city morgue attendant Grover Cleaver (Danny DeVito, looking a lot like he did as the Penguin), but it soon becomes evident that DeVito is pretty much slumming here, as if playing the role as part of a college fraternity prank.

By the end of the film, as we are forced to watch Sherman Hemsley of "The Jeffersons" prance around in his skivvies while taking a hot bath with his Scandinavian business partners, it's just a matter of holding your nose until the whole thing is over.
-- John Petrakis

[ RATING: F ]

Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski want to take their medicine. They're
the screenwriting duo who penned ''Ed Wood,'' ''The People vs. Larry Flynt,''
and ''Man on the Moon'' -- marvelously original ironic biopics in which the
lower the hero falls in the world's eyes, the higher he rises in ours. Each
of these movies was heady, audacious, and a box office dud. Combined, they
grossed less money -- $5.9 million, $20 million, and $35 million,
respectively -- than ''Deuce Bigalow'' or ''Blue Streak'' alone. And so
Alexander and Karaszewski are trying to reassert their value. In their first
outing as writer-directors, they've made a black-comic farce called Screwed,
and it's a shrill, stupid, brickbat-blatant piece of hackwork that
practically sweats to be ''commercial.''

The film stars Norm Macdonald, who, even when he's being interviewed, comes off like a zombie impersonating a game-show host; when he attempts to act, he's even stiffer. He plays Willard, manservant to Miss Crock (Elaine
Stritch), a sadistic biddy who treats him worse than her dog. Instead of
quitting, he comes up with a convoluted scheme to kidnap the pooch, and then
himself. He and his partner (Dave Chappelle) enlist the aid of an undertaker
played by Danny DeVito, who, beneath a Musketeer beard and comb-over fright wig, looks and sounds exactly like Danny DeVito.

There are poo-poo jokes, dental-plate jokes, moldy-corpse jokes, Jack Lord
jokes, and ''old lady getting dragged down the stairs'' jokes. With any other
filmmakers, I would have called this cynicism. In the case of Alexander and
Karaszewski, it's more like masochism: They appear to be locking themselves
in the screenwriters' doghouse and reveling in their worst notions of what
they think Hollywood wants. Good Scott! Good Larry! Now, please, go back to doing what you do so well.
-- Owen Gleiberman